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Creating a ROS Package

Description: This tutorial covers using roscreate-pkg or catkin to create a new package, and rospack to list package dependencies.

Using roscreate

Before we create a package, let's see how the roscreate-pkg command-line tool works. This creates a new ROS package. All ROS packages consist of the many similar files : manifests, CMakeLists.txt, mainpage.dox, and Makefiles. roscreate-pkg eliminates many tedious tasks of creating a new package by hand, and eliminates common errors caused by hand-typing build files and manifests.

To create a new package in the current directory:

# roscreate-pkg [package_name]

You can also specify dependencies of that package:

# roscreate-pkg [package_name] [depend1] [depend2] [depend3]

Creating a New ROS Package

Now we're going to go into your home or project directory and create our beginner_tutorials package. We are going to make it depend on std_msgs, roscpp, and rospy, which are common ROS packages.

You're going to want to spend some time looking at beginner_tutorials/manifest.xml. manifests play an important role in ROS as they define how Packages are built, run, and documented.

Now lets make sure that ROS can find your new package. It is often useful to call rospack profile after making changes to your path so that new directories will be found:

$ rospack profile
$ rospack find beginner_tutorials

YOUR_PACKAGE_PATH/beginner_tutorials

If this fails, it means ROS can't find your new package, which may be an issue with your ROS_PACKAGE_PATH. Please consult the installation instructions for setup from SVN or from binaries, depending how you installed ROS. If you've created or added a package that's outside of the existing package paths, you will need to amend your ROS_PACKAGE_PATH environment variable to include that new location. Try re-sourcing your setup.sh in your fuerte_workspace.

Try moving to the directory for the package.

$ roscd beginner_tutorials
$ pwd

YOUR_PACKAGE_PATH/beginner_tutorials

First-order package dependencies

When using roscreate-pkg earlier, a few package dependencies were provided. These first-order dependencies can now be reviewed with the rospack tool.

(Jan 9, 2013) There is a bug reported and already fixed in rospack in groovy; it may take some time to be reflected in the packages. If you see an issue similar to this with the next command, you can skip to the following command.

$ rospack depends1 beginner_tutorials

std_msgs
rospy
roscpp

As you can see, rospack lists the same dependencies that were used as arguments when running roscreate-pkg. These dependencies for a package are stored in the manifest file. Take a look at the manifest file.

Indirect package dependencies

In many cases, a dependency will also have its own dependencies. For instance, rospy has other dependencies.

(Jan 9, 2013) There is a bug reported and already fixed in rospack in groovy; it may take some time to be reflected in the packages. If you see an issue similar to this with the next command, you can skip to the following command.

$ rospack depends1 rospy

roslib
roslang

A package can have quite a few indirect dependencies. Luckily rospack can recursively determine all nested dependencies.

ROS Client Libraries

You may be wondering what rospy and roscpp dependencies are from the previous examples. rospy and roscpp are Client Libraries. The client libraries allow different programming languages to communicate through ROS. rospy is the client library for Python. roscpp is the client library for C++.

description tag

Change the description to anything you like, but by convention the first sentence should be short while covering the scope of the package. If it is hard to describe the package in a single sentence then it might need to be broken up.

This is a required and important tag for the package.xml because it lets others know who to contact about the package. At least one maintainer is required, but you can have many if you like. The name of the maintainer goes into the body of the tag, but there is also an email attribute that should be filled out:

You should choose a license and fill it in here. Some common open source licenses are BSD, MIT, Boost Software License, GPLv2, GPLv3, LGPLv2.1, and LGPLv3. You can read about several of these at the Open Source Initiative. For this tutorial we'll use the BSD license because the rest of the core ROS components use it already:

dependencies tags

The next set of tags describe the dependencies of your package. The dependencies are split into build_depend, buildtool_depend, exec_depend, test_depend. For a more detailed explanation of these tags see the documentation about Catkin Dependencies. Since we passed std_msgs, roscpp, and rospy as arguments to catkin_create_pkg, the dependencies will look like this:

All of our listed dependencies have been added as a build_depend for us, in addition to the default buildtool_depend on catkin. In this case we want all of our specified dependencies to be available at build and run time, so we'll add a exec_depend tag for each of them as well:

Customizing the CMakeLists.txt

Now that the package.xml, which contains meta information, has been tailored to your package, you are ready to move on in the tutorials. The CMakeLists.txt file created by catkin_create_pkg will be covered in the later tutorials about building ROS code.